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Carbon flows to be tracked by Software Tools

Software applications that track the flow of carbon emissions through a business will redefine how organisations engage in sustainable practices, consultancy KPMG says.

Just as businesses use a variety of applications to get a granular view of where dollars are made and spent, an emerging range of reporting tools will provide transparency of emissions output and other energy resources, according to KPMG risk advisory services director Bob Hayward says.

"It is KPMG's contention that in the next few years IT professionals will be asked to work with the whole business to construct a sophisticated and robust set of measurement instrumentation and reporting tools for non-financial data to track the flow of carbon through their business to the same level of detail that financial reporting tools do," Hayward says.

The emergence of these non-financial reporting tools will help chief information officers and IT professionals to demystify green IT, he says.

"A large number of IT organisations are only giving sustainability cursory attention.

"At the moment there is way too much emphasis on getting our own house in order as IT professionals. With the emergence of these new tools will come the opportunity to seize leadership and engage with the whole business about how technology can be used to reduce the other 98 per cent of emissions that the IT industry is not directly responsible for."

Hayward says chief information officers often complain about being left out of critical business decisions, but that is their own fault because IT departments are too insular.

"It's not enough to just green your data centre and apply virtualisation and think your job is done," he says. "IT professionals have to step up to the plate and engage in a dialogue with the business to let them know technology has a role to improve the whole organisation's environmental footprint."

Hayward says it is was time for IT departments to think outside the box when developing new ways to reduce carbon emissions across the business.

"It may even mean spending more on IT and raising carbon emissions in IT to reduce the overall emissions in the business," he says.